city lights sparkling on Earth

I'm trying to get PI to create the effect of city lights sparkling from the Earth's surface. I don't want particles to emit from one source and spread out. I need hundreds of them to emit from themselves if that makes sense. Is PI the right choice for this effect or another program? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated,

Here's a quick 5 minutes test in pI3, where I used Area Mask emitters with an Area emitter on top of an image of the earth with an alpha channel (basically I painted white where I wanted lights to appear, kept it black everywhere else).